The Washington Post got its hands on a manuscipt of Douglas Feith's attack memoir and dribbles out excerpts. Calling it a "massive score settling work", there is nothing shocking or revealing, other than it cements Feith's reputation as what General Tommy Franks calls stupidest fucking guy on the planet.
In what may be a shock to people who just weren't paying attention, the Post starts out with the "revelation" that Bush was hellbent on going to war:
Among the disclosures made by Feith in "War and Decision," scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush's declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that "war is inevitable." The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a "momentous comment."
More exposition of the obvious after the break.
The Iraq War was a debacle according to Feith, but according to the guy responsible for planning the Iraq War and its aftermath (Douglas Feith), it wasn't the Pentagon's fault:
Although he acknowledges "serious errors" in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that "even the best planning" cannot avoid all problems in wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was poorly executed and remains "grimly incomplete."
Feith places the blame for poor postwar planning on General Tommy Franks and Paul Bremmer, ignoring the fact that both of them were in charge of carrying out policy, military and post-war reconstruction respectively, not formulating it.
Bremer, meanwhile, is said to have done more harm than good in Iraq. Feith also accuses Franks of being uninterested in postwar planning, and writes that Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser during most of Feith's time in office, failed in her primary task of coordinating policy on the war.
Meanwhile, while correctly fingering a hopelessly out of her depth Condoleezza Rice for being out of her depth in coordinating interdepartmental policy (such as it was), he has nothing but praise for the man MOST responsible for the lack of planning in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, blaming him for merely breaking a few personnel eggs while messing up the Iraq omlet:
Feith depicts former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with almost complete admiration, questioning only his rough handling of subordinates.
Feith totally ignores the fact that there was no effective post war planning because this Administration has a history of having no Plan B because having a Plan B is planning for failure:
Over the years of U.S. involvement in Iraq, new plans have been launched with assurances of success -- the return of sovereignty to a handpicked Iraqi administration in the summer of 2004; a democratically elected government in January 2005; "Plan Baghdad," designed to retake the capital from insurgents and militias, in the summer of 2006. The current Plan A is arguably already Plan D or beyond.
Feith laughably makes the assertion that he had to set up his own policy shop because the intelligence provided by the CIA was "politicized", the purest example of the strategy of "deny everything and make counter-accusations" I have ever seen.
And of course, that which does not neatly coincide with Douglas Feith's point of view on the war isn't even addressed in his book. And who benefits from criticism of the Iraq War? Who else? The press, of course. Not that I can recall anyone from the mainstream national press being overly critical of the war, of course.
Despite its bulk, the book does not address some of the basic facts of the war, such as the widespread skepticism inside the top of the U.S. military about invading Iraq, with some generals arguing that doing so would distract attention from the war against global terrorists. Nor does Feith touch on the assertion of his fellow war architect, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, that Iraq would be able to pay for its reconstruction with oil revenue.
Feith says surprisingly little new about the conduct of the war on the ground, instead focusing on the policy battles in Washington and asserting that most accounts thus far have been written from the point of view of the State Department and the CIA. He attacks those criticisms as "fear-mongering" that serves the interests of certain officials and journalists.
Read the whole thing and be amazed. Shorter Douglas Feith: "And we would have succeeded if it weren't for those meddling kids."
And to think: the stupidest man on the planet, the man that General Tommy Franks used to openly dis by rolling his eyes everytime Feith opened his mouth at policy meetings, is now teaching kids at our premier foreigh policy university, Georgetown. I don't think students need instruction on how to catastrophically fuck up. Stand on the corner of Wisconsin and M Street on a typical Friday night and you can see that for a fact.